Another savage shriek. All eyes to the reptant. Still unconscious. Suddenly a large shape drops from the tree and knocks Bill to the ground. A second reptant!
Andrea has Bill’s gun up to her shoulder in a flash and fires every remaining dart into the reptant. Feeling insanely alert, adrenaline flooding into her. Frustrated at the laws against real bullets, Andrea advances on the attacker and smashes at it wildly with the butt of the rifle. By the distraction as much as by the shots, she saves Bill’s life.
But no closure came from that purely instinctive reaction. Anna was lost. The funeral brought no closure either. Anna was gone. Lost needlessly to insane social experimentation. Lost to misguided Deep Ecological community planning. To suicidal laws that professed some ideological solutions to the question of man’s place in nature. Rubbish! And it cost her, not them.
Cost her in recriminations and blame and guilt. In a retreat from Bill. In endless pleading with the authorities to change the wild-land laws and repeated arguing for the imposition of buffer zones. All for nothing. Her new home had become truly alien and frightening, and she carried within her an emotional black hole, huge and consuming.
Five wasted years. Only the birth of Jonathan had preserved her sanity. With the arrival of Cindy four years later, time had begun to heal her wounds.
But some things time could never heal. Andrea felt a tear crawl slowly down her cheek.
In the deepening gloom, Bill switched the car from solar panels to batteries only. Then he found Andrea’s clenched left hand. Her fist opened and melted into his right hand. The tear reached her lips and she tasted the salt of it. She was surprised to realize that she didn’t even know if the tear had been born of her memories, or of Bill’s sweet touch.
She glanced back at Jonathan. She envied the contented look on his face. Andrea knew that, for herself, healing would never again be so easy.
Outside, the setting sun was transforming the trees on the retreating western horizon into flat black silhouettes against a blazing sky. Intricate traceries of twigs and leaves. Sooty doilies on edge, rolling away from the red/orange fires of the departed sun. It was stark beauty, at once totally alien and yet strangely evocative of her long-lost home in California’s Central Valley.
City lights winked into existence, background stars against the occasional comet of oncoming headlights. The stationary city lights, arranged in their inevitable rows and ranks, described emerging new patterns of life; new to this planet—new to some of that life form’s own members, Andrea thought.
The lights smeared and swam and ran in wavering white streaks all over the darkening land.
Andrea squeezed her eyes shut, flushing more sea water from them.
In a short two weeks, the first of a series of dreaded days arrived. Andrea had promised herself she’d make the best of today’s outing. After all, she and Bill had been through this four times before. Best to put on a good show, especially for Cindy’s sake. No sense passing her own neuroses onto her daughter’s impressionable developing psyche.
Besides, back on Earth, Andrea’s family had always observed the tradition of going out on a crisp winter’s day to chop down a Christmas tree. And later the family began to use live trees that would be replanted after the holidays.
Not so different from today’s mission.
Andrea extracted Cindy from her car seat as Bill opened the back door on the other side and said to Jonathan, “OK, my man, let’s see how you do with your first reptant.”
“Yeaahhh!!”
No music. Andrea missed the music of the season. Stupid, she knew, to equate Replant Day with Christmas. But it was an obvious parallel, especially with the winter solstice approaching. Why couldn’t they play some carols? The silence oppressed her as she carried her squirming daughter and followed her husband and excited son into the reptant nursery.
Silence gave way to hideous animal screeches, excited childish whoops and the muffled shots of tranquilizer guns.
The nursery was a huge permanent tent with an ancient reptant tree growing inside at one end, complete with a full grown guardian reptant prowling its branches. The other end of the tent was a loading dock and staging area filled with lorry-loads of caged baby reptants and potted reptant saplings. One long side of the tent sheltered a low building with no windows. The remaining area was a honeycomb of cubicles.
First stop, the big tree. By the time Andrea caught up with her men, Jonathan was looking through one of the many telescopes mounted in a circle around the tree. A high flexglass wall, completely encircling the tree, separated the tree from the people and the telescopes.
The tree was roughly oaken in overall shape and size, but close up it looked more like some giant ocean-dwelling animal/plant thing. Branches, twigs and leaves were an illusion. It was all one structure sculpted into a counterfeit tree shape. It had a meaty quality. Standing flesh, with a Salvador Dalí shark lurking inside. There was a slightly putrid aroma, peculiar to replant trees. The peppery smell of the “foliage” could not mask the odor of decay coming from the ground at the base of the tree.
Up in the tree there was movement. A low growl. All the telescopes on this side of the tree turned in unison, like seaweed swaying in a current. Shouts of, “I see it!” and “There!” Andrea looked up. Her breath caught. There it was, crawling along a large branch, with deceptive chameleonlike deliberation.
She turned away, unconsciously shielding Cindy from the spectacle. But Cindy squirmed and wriggled, and slowly slipped, like a lead weight, to the ground. Unwillingness triples a three-year-old’s weight, Andrea thought, as she let go.
Cindy ran to her brother, shouting and tugging his pant leg. “I want to see! Let me look!”
Jonathan, in a surprising moment of magnanimity, said, “OK, Sis. But you’re too short. Here. I’ll hold you.”
He got behind her and gave her a bear hug around the tummy. As he got set to lift, Andrea started to say—But the touch of Bill’s hand on her shoulder stopped her and she realized that this moment should not be denied.
Jonathan straightened up and Cindy got her eye to the eyepiece and held onto the telescope with both hands. “I can’t see anything. It’s all moving around.”
“Hold still!”
“You hold still!”
Bill took over, and steadied Cindy on his left hip. When she sighted the reptant he explained in calm soothing tones how it was designed for living in trees; big claws, perfect for holding on; big eyes, perfect for seeing in the dark, and how it never sleeps. Always patrolling… always patrolling.
It was easily the size of a leopard, but it looked like an evolutionary practical joke, stranger than a xenophobic Darwin could have concocted in a drugged dream. Its eight large muscular legs (or four legs and four arms, as some described them), covered in wicked-looking armor, had no less wicked-looking talons on birdlike feet.
Andrea felt tense and miserable. Even without a telescope the reptant repulsed her.
“It’s hungry, Daddy. Look at it eat!”
Andrea didn’t need to see. Memories crowded into her. Images indelibly burned in from past trips to this place, from docuvids and pixboox she’d studied as part of her orientation, and from that day. She saw the mouth, crudest joke of all. Opposing pairs of fangs, the size of a saber-toothed tiger’s canines, stood sentry outside a gaping hole that was more the upper terminus of the alimentary canal than a true mouth. Unfit for anything like chewing, it could only slurp down whole the spherical fruit that grew abundantly on the larger branches. Like an anteater, or more like a vacuum cleaner ingesting ping pong balls, that mouth could strip hundreds of the so-called “Earth Apples” off a branch in minutes.